Is Australia’s highest paid university boss really for free education?

If the Australian Financial Review’s Julie Hare is to be believed, University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell has “joined an alliance of Greens, socialists and student unions calling for the reintroduction of free university”.

This is a surprising alliance, to say the least. Maskell receives an annual salary of $1.5 million, making him the highest paid of any Australian vice-chancellor. He sits on the board of the ASX-listed biotech company CSL. In his five years as vice-chancellor, he has overseen multiple restructures and wage theft scandals and the sacking of hundreds of staff. In 2020, he publicly stated his scepticism of lifesaving lockdowns, questioning whether the cost of keeping the elderly alive was in the overall public interest.

At his annual address to the university in June, Maskell proclaimed his support for free education, arguing to shift away from “the idea that university education is only of private benefit to individuals—not public benefit to societies”.

But any such pronouncements about the “public good” from bosses like Maskell must be scrutinised. Higher education is, after all, now a multibillion-dollar industry that has relentlessly imposed cost-cutting measures. It is an unlikely coincidence that these headline-grabbing comments were made just hours before hundreds of University of Melbourne staff began a 24-hour strike against Maskell’s refusal to grant basic job security and a real pay rise to his 12,000 employees.

If Maskell is so keen on equalising access to education, what exactly has he done to make tertiary education more affordable and accessible?

The university’s US-style “Melbourne Model”, in which students complete general undergraduate courses and then more specific postgraduate degrees to gain qualifications, has massively increased student fees. A standard five-year undergraduate medicine degree, for example, costs around $59,000 at other universities and can be covered by a HECS-HELP loan. At the University of Melbourne, a full-fee position in the Doctor of Medicine program costs $366,000, on top of the cost of an undergraduate degree. This exceeds the cap for government loans, meaning students pay a significant portion out of pocket.

Maskell drew on his own ascension from a working-class background to top university executive in his speech. Yet the university he runs has a terrible record of helping poor prospective students: between 2013 and 2019, the number of students enrolled from low-SES backgrounds increased by just 23, according to data from the National Centre for the Study of Equity in Higher Education. Providing scholarships based on need rather than performance or making student accommodation more affordable could easily make the university more accessible.

Maskell’s call for free education has an important qualifier: it would be limited to domestic students. Profits in the higher education sector are based largely on fleecing international students for overpriced degrees. The University of Melbourne currently charges international students $100,000 to $180,000 for a bachelor’s degree. In 2020, it made $845 million from international student fees.

Under Makell’s vision for a more “equitable” higher education system, the sector would continue to make massive profits from exporting education on the international market, while receiving more government funding for domestic students to offset the reduction in student fees. And where should this additional government revenue come from, according to Maskell? Not additional taxes on the corporations and billionaires who benefit from the supply of skilled graduates, but from increased taxes on graduates themselves.

The university’s submission to the Labor government’s Australian Universities Accord notes that free education “seems extremely unlikely to gain government support”. This is correct—the ALP abandoned free education in the 1980s and has since increased student fees repeatedly. But if Maskell really is a believer in free (or even more affordable) education, he could easily slash student fees himself. To pay for it, perhaps he could sell some of the university’s 200 inner-city real estate assets, or cash in some of its multibillion-dollar investment portfolio. Tapping into 2021’s $584 million surplus could be a start.

But he will never consider doing any of that, because he’s the boss of a corporate university. He will always put profits above the interests of staff and students.